I can hardly believe my time here at Kijabe is already 1/3 over! I know sometimes its not good to count the days, but I am loving it here and its hard to believe I’ll leave Africa (again) so soon!

The past month has been so, SO busy!! I can’t remember if I’ve posted already or not, but I was asked to cover a junior girls’ form for the first month of the term because the long-term dorm parents were delayed in their arrival from the USA. I have loved being in the dorm, but it is time to be done!! I officially move out on Friday. Lesson planning becomes more and more of a beast as the AP class progresses through material and it becomes more challenging, so it will nice to be free at night to plan. The past month as consisted of starting my planning at 11 pm after the dorm girls are in bed, and most nights I am in bed between 12 a.m. and 1:00 in the morning. Short nights!!! My work days have been 7:45 a.m. to 11:00 pm or beyond, and that gets wearing really quick.

The time in the classroom has gone well, though. The students relate to me well and I am automatically a favorite because of my age! 🙂 There aren’t many young twenty-somethings on staff, so students enjoy the ones that are here. But my dorm girls (many of whom I have in class) tell me I am strict in a nice way in the classroom, which is good. Its important to keep a healthy level of respect when the age gap is so small. The subject material is almost foreign to me, since it has been so long since I first learned it and most of it has become so ingrained in my thinking that I forget ever having learned it. We had our first test last week, and the students did not do as well as I would have hoped. They have a take-home re-test to fix problems that many students missed, and we’ll see if that ameliorates the grades situation.

Many times over the past month I have been struck by how much more fun this would be if it were my second time teaching the material! So much of the stress and work goes into refreshing my memory and organizing my thoughts about how to present things. I teach each lecture three times, and usually the 2nd and 3rd version are better than the first. I am sure it would be the same if I were teaching this class again next year. The kids are also SO well behaved. I left my class alone for a few minutes to run to the library today, and came back and they were all quietly seated working on their worksheets. I know that could never happen in a public high school, and that is a sad reality I am faced with if I decide to teach high school in the USA.

There are lots of thoughts running around in my head as I continue to work through the term. I have enjoyed it so far. There are between 10 and 15 ‘young’ people on Kijabe station, which has provided an unexpected but pleasant social network that makes the weekends a fun time to hang out, etc. One girl graduated from Wheaton a year after me, and we have mutual friends. Small world!!!

I will be emailing out a prayer letter with a couple pictures later this week. Thanks for your prayers and support for my time here, and for your investment in Missionary Kids at RVA. It has been great so far, and I am confident that the Lord will complete what He started by bringing me out here–however it goes!

All for His Glory~

Ashley

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One Response to >4 weeks have F-L-O-W-N by!

>I identify so much with what you say about teaching! Granted I’m only teaching lab, but my second section gets a much better job than my first, and that frustrates me a lot.A crazy thing that happened: Ben Bratton’s advisor came and gave a seminar! It was kind of weird seeing Ben’s picture up on the slide and remembering the time he said that organic chemistry was only useful insofar as it helped one understand biochem. Good times.